Meet The New Eves, the band rewriting old stories through a modern lens
This Brighton quartet make what feel like trad folk songs performed by a ferocious rock band
‘The New Eve’, the new single by the quartet The New Eves, is described by the band as a “manifesto” for their project.
The song, which previews upcoming debut album The New Eve Is Rising, features the bewitching vocals of Nina Winder-Lind, describing The New Eve as “curious and free,” eating “every fruit from every tree” with the lilt of an impassioned poet, over foreboding strings.
The description also fits the band’s sound and ethos. The Brighton-based outfit have made their name with animated and energetic live performances, while on record they reframe centuries old stories with a modern lens, bringing women closer to the centre of these previously exclusionary tales.
While these lyrical and thematic devices often lend themselves to folk music sonics, The New Eves present them through scything and energetic rock music, bringing grandeur and biblical noise.
Of the new song, Winder-Lind says: “It’s written as an ode to and a celebration of the new Eve and what that means and who she is and who we are and who anyone can be.”
Read our interview with the band – Winder-Lind, drummer and flautist Ella Oona Russell, bassist Kate Mager and violinist, guitarist and dancer Violet Farrer – and listen to ‘The New Eve’ and their other new single, ‘Rivers Run Red’, as part of our Play Next playlist on Spotify, below.
Your debut album, The New Eve Is Rising, encompasses your whole story from your formation until now – can you tell us about how you have developed in that time?
Kate: When we started writing the first songs, we didn’t really know whether we were going to even like play shows or do anything. We weren’t planning for them to be in an album, but once we thought about making an album, it just made so much sense to for it to encompass the whole first chapter of us as a band.
Violet: [All the songs] work together regardless of which one’s older and which one’s newer. It’s not that we haven’t like advanced, but they all go together, and they’re all just us.
Nina: Are we more refined? No, we’re not more refined. Are we more assertive? Ah, we were very assertive at the beginning!
Kate: Every time we write a new song, we look into a slightly different place, but, like the others were saying, it all just seems to fit together. That’s what always amazes me. We go from such a different angle but somehow it still fits together. We’re like, ‘How does this work?!’ But it just does.
If this album is presenting the band’s first era, what do you think are the hallmarks of The New Eves so far?
Nina: There’s a real honesty about this body of work – this is literally what just came out of us, whether we wanted it or not. What do you guys think?
Kate: We don’t have this direct comparison of what the next chapter ais nd what’s different about it. There is something really great about all of this stuff just coming from us without having that feedback of people listening to it and defining what it is for us. It’s very free in that sense, and anything that comes afterwards will partly be an interaction with that.
Nina: It’s very honest and it’s very confident, in the way that a child is really confident. Maybe we didn’t really know what we were doing all the time, but in some way, we really, really, really did know what we were doing and we did it, and this stands as proof of that.
You’ve said you want to create your own mythology as a band – can you explain that?
Kate: It feels like the right way to properly announce ourselves to the world by putting out an album rather than an EP. There are quite big differences sometimes between the songs and the themes that any one of them on their own feels like it misses out this other part of what we are. The album doesn’t necessarily have a story that runs throughout it, but it does say something as a whole thing that you can’t do with just one song. We really felt it was really important to do that.
Nina: It was parallel to the songwriting process. One of us will have read a book and we bring it in, and then it ignites something.
On the single ‘Highway Man’, you flip Alfred Noyes’ 1906 poem into a version that foregrounds the women far more – how did that come together?
Nina: We were jamming, and you guys talked about the Highway Man poem, which I had never heard of. I grew up in Stockholm. I went home and read it and then rewrote it.
Does it feel powerful and necessary to change narratives that feel set in stone after so many years or even centuries?
Nina: We really like doing that, yeah. I mean, it’s in our band name, you know? We’re redefining one of the oldest stories in our time.
Kate: I think it’s really important for everyone as individuals to constantly be examining the stories that make up our understanding of the world. It’s about realising that they are stories, and it’s in our power to change them.